


this merry and desperate drought

by a_verysmallviolet



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Enemies to Friends, Gen, Healing, Hospitals, Implied/Referenced Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-04-09 20:34:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4363286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_verysmallviolet/pseuds/a_verysmallviolet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of the Equalist revolution, Korra visits a physically and mentally scarred Tarrlok. Gradually, she comes to realize there is more than one way to lose an enemy, and more than one way to save one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this merry and desperate drought

**Author's Note:**

> _“Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don't want it. What seems conceit, bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.”_ \- Miller Williams
> 
> The title comes from Vienna Teng's "Drought."

The first visit is brief. Tarrlok’s too drowsy with painkillers to speak; Korra isn’t even particularly sure he recognizes her. On her part, she can spend no more than a few minutes in the room before she flees. This is…this is wrong, somehow, this whole scene. He looks shrunken in the hospital bed, half his face covered in bandages and his lean frame swathed in a nondescript beige gown. Korra can only look at the empty space where his right forearm should be for a moment before she looks away.

“I, um…” she says, casting around the room for something to focus on. It’s all blank, sterile, shrieking of illness: not even a bit of blue to ease the eye. “I wanted to come by, see how you were doing…”

The worst of it all is the lack of emotion in his eye, half-focused and drowsy. The Tarrlok she remembers would have smirked knife-sharp at her fumbling words and cut her to pieces. This one only stares off into the distance.

“I have to go,” she says, standing up and brushing her hands on her legs as though to sweep off the sour scent of the hospital. “I have to go practice my – my bending, you know, and there’s a lot of other stuff I have to do…”

Tarrlok’s head lolls on the pillow, his gaze drifting off somewhere on the wall. His mouth is slack. Korra averts her eyes, feeling somehow that she is intruding, and makes her way out. At the door she pauses with her hand on the frame and looks back.

“I’ll come back.”

It’s as much a promise to him as it is to herself.

\- - -

She pauses in the doorway when she sees the healer.

“Am I interrupting?” she asks.

Both the healer and Tarrlok turn to look at her.

“Not at all, Avatar,” the woman says, drawing the water back into the basin. “We’re nearly finished with the healing. I just need to apply new bandages and then we’re set.”

Behind the healer’s back, Tarrlok rolls his visible eye at Korra, which is both so odd and so fitting to him that she has to stifle a laugh behind her fist and a faked cough. By accident, her eyes drift down to the healer’s hands, and the laughter dies in her throat. The side of Tarrlok’s hospital gown is unpinned; in between the bandages and the healer’s deftly moving hands, Korra can catch glimpses of brutal, dark red scarring. Suddenly she is intensely thankful for the bandages spanning the right side of his face.

The healer fastens the last of the clasps on his gown and picks up the basin of water, bowing to Korra as she heads out. Tarrlok’s eye still seems a little unfocused as he watches Korra enter the room, but at least he’s sitting up, and he can track her movements without too much difficulty.

“Nice of you to come and visit.”

His words slur slightly, just different enough from his usual light tones to be jarring. Korra sits down on the hard metal chair and pretends to ignore it.

“You have a nice view,” she says after a moment’s thought, gesturing out the window at the statue of Katara on hospital grounds. The corners of Tarrlok’s mouth turn up.

“Yes, I’ve always enjoyed looking at the ocean.”

Korra falters. She had heard the news of the explosion and the bodies lifted from the bay from Tenzin, and read the reports afterwards. Noatak’s death would be reason enough to avoid any mention of the topic. As for the speculation that the explosion was not an accident…she doesn’t want to talk about that now, not with the memory of pine needles underfoot and the hushed quiet of a grove, not with a wan-faced Tarrlok whose single eye meets hers too relentlessly.

He smirks at her obvious discomfort, familiarity passing like a ghost over his sunken features.

“Avatar, you are truly awful at small talk, and I…” he sinks back against the pillows, “I don’t have the energy for it right now. What do you want?”

Korra pauses a moment, toying with the edge of her fur wrap. He is the last person she’d have expected this level of directness from, but perhaps…well, perhaps it’s for the best.

“While I was at the South Pole,” she starts, staring straight across at the wall, “I managed to access the Avatar State.”

She turns her head slightly towards him. He lifts an eyebrow.

“And? Do you expect me to congratulate you?”

Korra takes a breath and slowly lets it out. “Aang showed me how to energybend,” she says carefully, watching his face as she speaks. “I can use that to restore people’s bending. That’s what I’ve been doing these past few weeks.”

Tarrlok says very quietly, “Ah.”

Korra makes a noncommittal noise and drops her eyes a moment. When she looks back up at him, he is smiling.

“I take it you are here to offer me redemption?”

There is something wrong in his smile, something too glassy, too bright. Korra shakes off her sense of unease. “Yes, I am.”

“No. Thank you.”

Korra blinks at him. “Excuse me?”

“No. I don’t want my bending back.”

His voice is so casual he could be turning down a drink.

The shock of it hits Korra cold beneath her breastbone. She still remembers too clearly the sense of being severed from her bending, like being blinded and deafened and slammed away from the world, and the blessed wholeness when it was restored. Since then she’s returned bending to dozens of people. Some approach in skepticism, some in fear, some with a desperate hope shining in their eyes. All rise from their knees with the same expression of rebirth. Perhaps some of the awe comes from her, the Avatar, but most of it is centered on the nerves in their fingertips and the ability to suddenly _breathe_ again. She cannot imagine why someone would turn that down.

“Tarrlok, why would you…”

His expression is full of knowing mockery as he meets her eyes straight on. In a daze Korra rises to her feet, still staring at him.

“Is this some kind of….I don’t know, some kind of atonement?”

“Now, what put such an idea into your head?” He grins at her, wide and easy. “What on _earth_ would I have to punish myself for?”

Korra shakes her head, half in denial, half to clear her mind. The wrongness of this entire conversation peals in her mind like alarm bells. His smile and his words are too smoothly serene; his eye, too cool and dispassionate. Try as she might, she can’t get a grip on him. But she has to. This goes beyond his bending, beyond all the inexplicable ways their lives connect. She doesn’t know what she is fighting for, but she knows to her bones that it is important.

“Tarrlok,” Korra says. “You’re not your brother. Bending doesn’t have to be something evil for you.”

Something cracks in his expression. It takes him just a moment too long to smile again.

“Thank you for that information. No.”

Korra blinks and takes a step back. With a chuckle, Tarrlok shakes his head.

“And now this conversation is going to be very awkward. I think it would be for the best if you went.”

She’s lost him again. Already there is a remote quality to his smile, and his gaze drifts ever so slightly to the sea outside his window. Korra can’t find the words to reach him, is not even sure that there are any words. In these few seconds of silence he’s already turned away from her. Something about the sea and the gray sky has caught his attention: perhaps the stillness of the air, or that particular formation of clouds. For all the notice he pays her, she might as well not be in the room. Korra begins to speak, even to step forward and reach out a hand towards him. Then, with a sigh, she turns away.

“I will come back,” she says with her hand on the door.

He shrugs carelessly, staring out the window. “Do as you like.”

\- - -

She’s completed her duty. She doesn’t _have_ to come back. Whatever alliance ever existed between her and Tarrlok, it was gone the second he bloodbended her. She could walk away now. To leave this hospital with its smell of illness, its muted colors and hushed voices: she would be perfectly in her rights to do that. Suddenly it seems there is nothing she wants more to do. Run. Leave. Leave this all behind.

Korra balls her hands in her pockets, heaves a sigh, and starts up the stairs.

Outside it is sunny, the last breath of summer in Republic City, but the hospital halls are cool. As her footsteps echo through the dim halls, Korra glances out at the bay and takes a deep breath, trying to meditate her way into the ocean’s steady flowing calm.

It works until she reaches Tarrlok’s room and looks inside. Somehow the sight of his thin frame seated by the window jars Korra out of any calmness she’s dredged up, and she actually has to pause a minute before she coughs and knocks on the doorframe.

She has to knock twice before he hears, but Tarrlok doesn’t show any surprise when he turns around.

“Good day, Avatar.”

“Hey.” Korra gestures with her chin at the other chair. “Can I sit down?”

“What would you do if I said no?”

“Probably take a seat anyway.”

The noise Tarrlok makes is somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. He starts to gesture at the chair with what is left of his right arm, pauses, and then shrugs.

“Go ahead and sit down then.”

Korra crosses the shadowy room into the patch of sunlight by the window and seats herself. Someone has arranged the chairs so that they face each other, most likely in hopeful anticipation of visitors.

“I heard Tenzin came to visit you,” she offers after a moment.

“Yes. He and the other council members.” Tarrlok’s mouth crooks. “I’ll give him this, he always does his duty. Just as soon as he figures it out.”

“That’s…nice,” she says carefully. “Did they have anything interesting to say?”

“The usual. Sincere condolences. A letter of resignation for me to sign. Assurances that they shan’t press charges until I’m reasonably likely to survive.”

Korra can’t manage more than an “oh…” in reply. Stealing a glance at him from under her lids, she continues, “So…how are you feeling?”

Tarrlok blows out sharply.

“Well,” he says. “I was on a boat that exploded. I lost half my right arm. The healers won’t say anything about my eye, but I’m pretty sure I lost that too. All things considered, I’m feeling marvelous.”

She glowers at him. The look he gives her in return would be pitying if it wasn’t so superior, and he shakes his head.

“Like I said, Avatar, you’re very bad at small talk.”

“If you have the energy for sarcasm,” Korra retorts, “then you have the energy to be polite.”

That seems to give Tarrlok pause. He tilts his head to the side, almost like Naga, and studies her with a thoughtful, curious look. Then he smiles, suddenly and awfully, and the moment is gone.

“All right then. I’m feeling very well, thank you for asking. And how are you feeling today?”

“Very well, thank you,” she says, mimicking his clipped tone. Tarrlok chuckles, the sound no more breaking his mask than a puff of air.

“Now that we’ve completed the pleasantries, shall we move on to business? Or am I to believe you only came here for love of poor me?”

“No,” she says. “I don’t have any reason for visiting you. Not everyone has ulterior motives.”

“How very scandalous.”

Korra narrows her eyes. Annoyance flares hot in her chest, annoyance at every double-veiled and half-meant remark he’s ever flung at her, and she speaks before she thinks.

“Are you ever honest?” she demands. “With anyone, at all?”

Tarrlok lifts his shoulders in a shrug, spreading his fingers with a shadow of the old grace. “Do I have any reason to be?”

Their eyes meet at the same moment, and then slide away. She knows, like her, he is remembering a quiet, dust-scented attic. Korra is honest with everyone – always has been, always will be. He has only ever been honest with her once.

Tarrlok looks down, pleating the edges of the cushion, and won’t look at her again.

Korra compresses her lips, cursing his pride at the same moment she is grateful for it. Present-day sorrow sits too uneasily with memories of arrogant eyes and whip-graceful bending, of his face contorted with something between rage and self-loathing. Tarrlok is not whole – far from it – but bitter now, mocking, he puts up a very good show.

“What have you got to lose?” she asks now.

He glances back at her, widening his eye in exaggerated surprise. “My, my. Getting to be quite the politician, I see.”

“Coming from you, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

He chuckles. The sound, thin and false, makes her skin crawl.

“So you want me to be _honest.”_ His tone makes a snake’s caress of the word. “A word of advice to you, my young Avatar. Nothing comes free.”

“Which means…?”

“Which means I want something in return.” Again he smiles at her; again the combination of smiling mouth and lifeless eye makes Korra fight back a shudder. “I like deals, don’t you? Let’s make one. You satisfy my curiosity on one minor issue – _honestly –_ and I’ll do the same for you. Fair enough?”

“How do I know you’ll hold up your end of the bargain?” Somehow she doesn’t question that she herself will answer honestly. His smile widens.

“I suppose you’ll have to trust me. That shouldn’t be too difficult.”

Korra edges up her chin and gives him back look for look.

“Fair enough.” She settles back in her chair. “Shoot.”

Instead of replying at once, Tarrlok tilts his head to the side, studying her. Korra fidgets in her seat, but returns his gaze steadily.

He is not smiling anymore. Tarrlok’s face now is a mask as impassive as his brother’s, and his soft voice holds even less expression. “Why are you here, Avatar?”

“Why do you care?” Korra parries back. His mask doesn’t shift as he replies,

“I want to know what makes you think you have a duty to forgive me.”

“I…” Korra says, and fights the sudden urge to look away. “That’s not…that’s not why I keep coming back.”

“Why do you, then?”

This time, before his single ice-pale eye, she does look down.

“When we were in the attic on Air Temple Island,” she says, the words seeming to drag in her throat. “You told me to stop…your brother. I – the plan went wrong, and he escaped, and then you…you….”

It takes every bit of strength she has, but she raises her head and meets his gaze directly. For an instant she sees no guards there, only some naked emotion she can’t name, before the coolness comes slamming back down.

“So this is a matter of guilt.” Tarrlok laughs, very quietly, and without a hint of amusement. “I should have known.”

Suddenly Korra wants to recoil from him as she would from a snake. His words and his smile make her skin crawl, and when he isn’t smiling there are moments when his gaze is like that of a drowned creature’s. Altogether it makes her want to lay her ears back and flee out into the living, light-filled air, anywhere away from this mocking-eyed, cold-eyed, dead-eyed man.

 _Dead-eyed_.

Once she had been on the verge of burning him alive. Later, she had merely left him. And he almost died. Fire and water, betrayal upon betrayal, her hand and Aang’s somehow on the threads of life and years that span generations.

Korra does not understand Tarrlok, never has. Perhaps she never will. But in this moment now as he looks at her there is something quiet and dire behind the willful cruelty of his gaze: something lost.

Her voice comes out softer than she had expected.

“I claim my question now.”

One eyebrow goes up; the corner of his mouth goes down.

“Your question?”

“I was honest with you,” Korra says steadily. “I told you the truth when you asked me why I was here. Now it’s your turn. I ask one question, and you answer honestly.”

For a moment he is silent, before his mouth curls into something that’s neither smile nor grimace. “Very well then. Ask.”

It is strange. Amon will always be her first fear, but now, in this moment of fragile stretching silence, asking a question of his hollow-eyed, slender-boned brother can make her cold with a shadow of the same dread.

“Did you do it?”

“I’ve done a lot of things, Avatar, most of them unsavory. Some specifics would be nice.”

“They said…” Korra takes a deep breath and forges on. “They said you blew up the boat. On purpose.”

“Well, you know, forensics in Republic City is usually quite good. I’d take their word for it.”

He’s looking out the window as he speaks, his face turned in profile to her and the bandages hidden. Were it not for his short-cropped hair, he would look almost normal. Not quite: his eye and mouth are still sunken, and there’s a guardedness to his features that was never there before. There is a guardedness, but also, for an instant, a weariness as deep as the ocean. Something tentative and small unfolds beneath Korra’s breastbone: too wary for compassion, but still closer to it than any other emotion.

“Why did you do it?” she asks when she thinks her voice will be steady.

Tarrlok shrugs a shoulder, not turning away from the window. “I thought for once I’d do the world a favor. Get rid of two blights at the same time.” He angles his head slightly toward her with a crooked smile and gestures at himself. “You see how well that worked out.”

She looks away. The glitter of sunlight on the waves is clear in her eyes.

“If I’d stopped Amon at the rally…” she starts.

“Don’t blame yourself. None of this is your fault.”

The unexpected kindness is so misplaced that Korra wants to either laugh or cry. Of course, it would be the plainest lie of all that he actually believes. If she’d succeeded as she was supposed to at the rally, Tarrlok would have survived. She knows better than to think that he is wholly alive now.

She swallows and looks down at her hands. “Tarrlok, I’m…” she starts.

He shakes his head. “And don’t apologize. Neither of us deserves that.”

She doesn’t know how to answer that either.

With a faint sigh, Tarrlok leans his head backwards against the chair back and closes his eye. It’s an oddly vulnerable gesture, one Korra doesn’t know how to respond to. Instead, she simply studies him in silence, and tries not to feel how strange it is to have no wisp of malice or enmity hovering between them.

For once, he looks his age. The sunlight brings out small, fine lines Korra hadn’t noticed before around his eye and mouth, as well as the hollows at his temple and below his cheekbone. Although his breathing is slow, it is not peaceful.

“Tarrlok?” she asks quietly. He stirs and half-opens his eye.

“Just tired,” he replies, his voice as quiet as hers. “I don’t have much energy these days.”

Korra makes a small, futile gesture.

“Do you want to go back to bed?”

For a moment she thinks he will say no, but then he nods. Briefly he shuts his eye again. “I would appreciate that. No, don’t get up,” he says as she starts to rise. “I can do it myself.”

Korra sinks back in her seat, trying not to make her concern too obvious as Tarrlok braces his hand on the armrest and slowly gets to his feet. His steps are halting as he makes his way back to the bed, his breathing just a little too careful to be natural. Still, he manages the trip unaided, and when he settles back into bed, he arranges the blankets around him with the familiar fussiness.

“I despise these sheets,” he says with a touch of petulance. “They lack any ability to breathe whatsoever.”

Amusement ghosts across her mind. “I suppose you’re used to sleeping on silk sheets?”

“If you’re going to be sarcastic, Avatar, you needn’t bother coming back.”

“ _You’re_ telling me not to be sarcastic.”

“Fair enough,” he admits. Korra chuckles quietly, feeling some of the tension ebb from the room like snowmelt into the ground. From the way Tarrlok lets himself lean back slightly into the pillows, his hand loosely curled at his side, he can sense the same.

“And yes,” he says after a pause. “I do prefer silk.”

This time Korra bites down hard on the inside of her cheek, but she still can’t quite hold her smile back.

\- - -

A calmness settles over him day by day. True, the books she brings him remain untouched on the bureau. True, he still stares out at the bay in the middle of their conversations. But this new sense of quietness soothes, is far less nerve-wracking than his earlier sardonic cheer. Some days he actually seems to mean his smiles. She accepts them, and probes no further. This peace is enough. 

She brings a Pai Sho board one day. They set the board up on the side of the bed and play game after game.

He is more relaxed than she has ever seen him, here or in the time before. He distracts her from her playing with his teasing and jokes, smiles often and with teeth, quarrels good-naturedly with her over the outcome of their games.

 “You look like you’re feeling better!” she tells him laughingly, flushed with victory and the strangest sense of relief.

 “Yes,” he smiles back. “I suppose I am.”

There is nothing brittle in his voice or his smile when he says that. There is nothing wrong at all.

\- - -

The next time she comes to visit, it is raining, the first hard rain of the season. Korra waterbends the rain off her shoulders as she enters the hospital lobby, flushed from her run and almost giddy with joy. The fire in her always complains a little when it rains, but she still loves this weather. Feeling the constant stream of water all around her is like being back in the South.

“Avatar Korra?”

“Yeah?”

Korra looks up. This is one of the new healers, a soft-faced girl with the spiral cheek tattoos of the far north. Korra doesn’t quite remember her name.

“Avatar Korra,” the healer repeats in her soft, breathy voice. “Will you be seeing Councilman Tarrlok today?”

“Yeah, I’ve been visiting him for a few weeks now,” Korra says, brushing off the use of ‘councilman.’ Probably this girl is so newly arrived from the North she hasn’t yet gotten used to the council’s dissolution. The healer hesitates.

“When you go to see him,” she says finally, “do not be too alarmed. He is not well.”

“What? Why?”

Again the healer hesitates. Korra fights down a sudden swoop of fear. What’s going on?

“The councilman is worse than he was, but it is not as you think. He…” Her blue eyes falter and drop away from Korra’s. She seems to shrink in on herself, as though afraid of her own words. “Please, go up now. You will understand when you see him.”

The healer backs away, bowing with her hands clasped over her chest, and all but flees around the corner. Korra looks after her a moment, absolutely bewildered, and then takes the stairs up three at a time.

Her mind is whirling with thoughts of infected burns or a fall, so when she pushes the door open and sees no new equipment or medicines, she stops a moment in surprise. It’s true that Tarrlok hasn’t greeted her with his usual half-ironic courtesy, but perhaps he is asleep. Admittedly, it is midmorning, but still….

Korra scans the room, the sudden hard drumming of the rain drowning out her pulse. For a moment she sees nothing out of place. Then she notices the snowy newness of the bandage around his throat, stark and jarring against the other wrappings, and she goes cold.

In two quick strides she is beside the bed.

“What happened?”

“An accident,” he says in a dull voice, “involving a broken bottle and a fit of clumsiness.”

He does not turn his head to look at her.

Of a sudden the coldness in her veins is replaced with fury. For a moment she shakes so hard, has such a burning lump in her throat that she cannot speak. _The last time I saw you, you were laughing_ , she wants to shout at him. _Why would you do this?_ How _could you do this?_

The last question is the one she finally spits out, and the one that makes him close his eye.

“You absolute – look at me, damn you!” she snarls. There is the barest trace of a flinch, which she ignores because he should not be like this, he should be stronger, more resilient, _he should be more than this._ “That was such a stupid, stupid thing to…you were getting better, why would you suddenly decide…”

He presses his lips together, sinks down a little deeper in the blankets. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” she snaps.

“Don’t pretend you care. It’s not like it matters.”

“It _does_ matter,” she almost howls. “Why - _why_ are you doing this to yourself? There’s so much, _so much_ to live for, if you’d just open your eyes and _see…_ ”

“Korra,” he says, and his voice is suddenly very tired. “What makes you think I care anymore?”

“Because,” she bursts out, and then stops. Because nothing could be so terrible as that, she had been about to say. Because no one could possibly feel such despair and self-loathing they would wish to throw away their own life.

Except once, she had too.

Korra stands with shaking hands and stares down at him, stands with all her words dying on her lips because no matter how she tries to phrase them, they always circle back to one ice-clear thought. When she had stood on that cliff in the South Pole, she had had Mako and Bolin, Asami, her parents, Master Katara, Tenzin and his family, even Lin: all of them standing with her and helping her to step back. Tarrlok has no one.

“Tarrlok…” she starts again, softly.

He turns his face to the wall. “Go away, Korra.”

And he will not say anything more.

\- - -

The storm blows itself out overnight, and the next morning is as clean and clear as spring water. As early as the hour is when Korra heads into the streets, the city is already waking into life. Cars blare, crowds mill, skyscrapers plunge up overhead, all of it illuminated by the milk white day.

In contrast, the hospital nearly deafens her with its silence. Korra stuffs her hands into her pockets and walks faster.

The room is nearly underwater with shadows when she enters. Only by the window is there a square of weak sunlight, cast onto the bed where Tarrlok sits propped up against a pile of pillows. In this thin, pale light, he looks very small. For a moment Korra half expects to see the light shining through him.

He does not turn his head as she comes in, does not even close his eye and pretend to be asleep. He simply stares off at the wall in front of him. The last time she had seen his expression so utterly empty, his brother had still been alive.

The chair legs squeal as Korra drags a seat up to the side of the bed and sits down.

“Tarrlok. I want to talk to you.”

Nothing. Not even the flicker of an eyelid.

“Tarrlok,” she repeats. The barest motion of his head tilts his face towards her. His expression and the slow drag of his breathing remain the same.

“I know that things haven’t always been the best between us,” Korra continues, fighting down despair as the figure in the hospital bed does not move or reply, “but you need to understand. Dying isn’t…it’s not the only path. You don’t deserve to die.”

Tarrlok stirs slightly, and for a moment she thinks he will finally answer. But then he settles back against the pillows without speaking or moving again.

“It’s…hard to move on after…after something difficult happens,” Korra continues when it’s plain no answer is forthcoming. “I get that. Sometimes it feels like it’s just another burden to carry when – when you’re already so tired. I…”

She trails off. The white bandage around his throat seems to accuse her. She drops her eyes to his hand.

Still the same hand, her mind notes idly. After all he’s gone through, still the same hand. Long and slender: perfect for waterbending. She’s seen him dance bladelike through enemies with that hand; she’s seen him bloodbend. Now it lies inert and still atop hospital sheets. Looking at the unexpected vulnerability of that thin, quiet hand, Korra finds it in herself to go on, stringing words together as they come from some well deep within.

“I know what it’s like,” she says quietly. “I know what it’s like to think the world would be a better place if you were gone.”

For the first time Tarrlok turns to actually look at her. A question gleams in his eye. Korra sees it, and avoids it. It is enough to see some flicker of life in him.

“But there are…good things too,” she continues. “There’s hope; there’s forgiveness. Even – even little things. Helping someone out, somebody smiling at you: that – that can make things seem not so dark. It’s hard. I know; it’s so hard. But you find hope; you find a purpose. And it gets easier with time.”

The long fingers twitch slightly against the linen sheets. Korra continues to speak in a low voice.

“You can still heal. You can live.”

Tarrlok sighs, his thin chest barely rising with the motion, and turns his head away from her to look out the window. From this angle she can only make out a sliver of his nose and cheekbone, a shadow of dark lashes against his cheek.

“Why should I?” His voice is slow and distinct. “What good have _I_ ever done the world?”

Korra knows without looking that his eye is fixed on the sea where his brother died.

“You were the first lawyer in eighteen years who was bold enough to prosecute a triad member,” she says. Her hands, twisted tight in her lap, are cold. “You helped convict twenty-three criminals in four years. You got a reputation for being one of the only prosecutors who couldn’t be bribed or threatened. You brought down the Red Monsoons’ second-in-command.” She pauses. This is dangerous ground. “You were the youngest councilman, the youngest chairman in the history of the United Republic. During your time on the council you set a record for the number of anti-triad legislation and successful arrests. Mugging, opium dens, extortion, prostitution: they’ve all gone down. The streets are cleaner than they’ve been in decades.”

There is a brief moment of silence. “You’ve done your research.”

The words nearly make Korra wish he hadn’t replied. Utterly lacking in emotion or inflection, they are almost, she thinks with a shiver, like the voice of a dead man.

She takes a breath and rallies on.

“You’re not…you’re not one bad decision,” she says. “You’re…”

 _You’re a good person_ , she had meant to say, but somehow the words will not come. She understands now, a little, why he acted as he did. She even forgives him for the actions he took personally against her. That does not mean she accepts them. The bullying of his fellow council members, the mass arrests, the kidnapping: those were not the acts of a good person.

He was a tyrant who loved the city he ruled as much as he loved power. He was a frightened boy, a ruthless manipulator, and a man torn apart by his own conscience. He was – Tarrlok _is_ someone who is both vindictive and brave, calculating and devoted to his principles, and he is so, so much more than simply a good or bad person.

“You’ve done good things,” Korra says instead. If Tarrlok noticed her pause, he gives no sign of it. “You’ve helped people. You made a difference – a good difference – in their lives.”

Another pause. Something flickers in his eye. He looks down at his single hand, the empty space where its mate should be, and lifts his shoulders in a tiny shrug, as though addressing an invisible jury. Then, with a sigh, he looks back at her. “A pity, then, that I couldn’t keep my lucky streak going.”

His quiet voice holds no malice, only a statement of fact. Like in the attic again: in his mind he’s already condemned himself.

“Tarrlok,” Korra says quietly, helplessly. Only his name, nothing more.

She finished Amon’s story in Yue Bay; Tarrlok finished Noatak’s out at sea. Whether he deserved it or not, it is done with; the rites to appease his ghost have been carried out, he no longer wanders the earth. But Tarrlok himself…he deserves more than a weariness and self-hatred so deep that it no longer cuts, only sinks deep into his bones. He deserves more, and she cannot think how to help him find it.

Something must show in her face, something of her bewildered desperation, because Tarrlok’s pale gaze softens as he watches her.

“You needn’t keep trying to save me, Avatar Korra.” His voice is gentler than she has ever heard it, as though he’s soothing a frightened child. “Believe me. I’m not worth it.”

He offers her a sad, sweet smile. And it is strange – it is so impossibly strange that this man with his thin face and tiredly sloping shoulders, this old enemy, should now be able to break her heart.

Suddenly she reaches out and lays her hand over his. Tarrlok draws his breath in, soft and quick with astonishment, and Korra knows nothing else she could have done would have startled him more.

“You’re worth it,” she tells him, her blue eyes blazing even as her touch on his hand remains gentle. His expression is still startled, wondering, but he does not pull away. “You are worth it.”

Tarrlok bites his lip, his gaze wavering away from hers but never quite dropping. “After all I have done?”

“Even so,” Korra says firmly, praying that he will not look away. “People…people make mistakes, Tarrlok. It’s all right.”

“When most people make mistakes,” he replies softly, “they don’t usually end up destroying a city and killing their brother.”

He is still looking at her, something quiet and vulnerable hovering around the corners of his mouth and the thin curve of his eyelid. For the first time she thinks she can name the emotion lingering in his eye: grief.

“People make mistakes,” she repeats. “People make mistakes, and they learn from them, and they get better, and they move on. Tarrlok, I promise you, things get better. They do.” Korra takes a shaking breath, blinks back whatever is hot and stinging behind her eyes, does not once look away from him. “You’ll be able to live again.”

Underneath her hand the thin fingers quiver. His voice is very soft.

“Korra…I don’t have your faith.”

“Then trust me,” Korra whispers. “Please.”

Tarrlok stares at her, his eye wide and his thin lips parted, _looks_ at her as though suddenly he is seeing her clearly for the first time. Korra sees him wet his lips, press them together tightly to still their sudden trembling. But he doesn’t say a word. He only continues to look at her wordlessly, even as the first tear breaks and falls. Then the second tear. The third.

Tarrlok is crying.

Silently and without covering his face, he weeps, and does not look away from her. And the look in his eye is like that of a lost child’s. And the tears continue to run slowly down his face.

Hesitantly, Korra stretches out her hand. Her fingertips just graze his face before he shakes his head convulsively and draws away, turning his face towards the light streaming through the window.

One ragged breath. Two. His hand fisted in the covers. His shoulders rising in choked, heaving gasps.

A stifled sob breaks out.

Tarrlok covers his face.

“I just want him back,” she hears him whisper. “I _just want all of it back_.”

Korra places her hand on his knee. “I’m sorry,” she tells him, and means it. She is sorry for his wrecked childhood, the ruin of his life, his desperate attempts to atone. Above all, she is sorry he cannot see he does not need to atone to deserve life.

Tarrlok drops his hand. He is crying now in earnest: eye squeezed shut, shoulders shaking, face crumpled and small. Tears streaming down his face.

As much as she wants to, Korra does not draw him near to her. She knows he would never be able to forgive this last violation of his pride. Instead she reaches for his hand again, laces her fingers through his and holds tight. She holds his hand, and he holds hers.

Tarrlok’s hand is cold and bloodless, still as ice. He doesn’t speak. But his grip isn’t half-hearted anymore, has strength instead, and for today she will accept this as a victory.

A small victory. A wounded victory. But enough to hope. 

\- - -

Trembling sunlight. His hand curled loosely by his side. Her eyes on his face, on the shape of his throat.

Wariness. And yet -

\- not.

“Can I have a glass of water?”

“Sure. Do you want a napkin too, or…”

“This is all right. Thank you.”

Her next visit is like that: quiet, desultory talk, their interactions cautious and yet easeful, as though a tightly tuned string has been loosened. His face is softer now, no longer filled with that terrible brittleness. There is something new between them, something Korra is shy of touching too closely. It feels delicate as a cobweb, light as hope, and for now it is enough to let it be.

Tarrlok has always been an expressive speaker, using neat, graceful motions of his hands and head to communicate as much as his voice. That’s why it hurts so much to speak to him now. There are too many awkward spaces as he starts to gesture with a hand that isn’t there, or begins to flick a braid over his shoulder before he remembers that his hair is mere centimeters long now. There are no more triumphant steeplings of his hands as he makes a particularly skillful argument, no more quiet clicking of beads as he shrugs his shoulders or inclines his head to concede a point.

Korra misses it more than she thought she would.

“I’m sorry about your hair,” she says during a lull in the conversation. It’s a shallow thing, but she has found, these past few weeks, that it’s the small things about him she misses the most.

He’s quiet a space. “I’m sorry too.”

His eye flicks over at her, oddly hesitant. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and agrees quietly, “Yeah.”

Silence seeps in for a few seconds before she says, “So…I told you about the elections for president, right?”

“You did, yes.”

“Well, all the candidates have all stepped forward by now. Everything’s going well; the political analysts says it looks like the nonbenders are going to turn out in record numbers for this election.”

“That’s good.”

Korra chews her lip. “I’m worried,” she confesses.

“You? Why?”

“With the council, there were more people on there, so responsibility was spread out. Whoever becomes president is practically going to have free rein. I mean, sure, there’s the Constitution of the Republic and all, but...”

“You think, if worse comes to worse, you’ll have to go head-to-head with them much faster.”

She lifts her head, startled. “Yeah. How’d you guess?”

He lifts his eyebrow an infinitesimal amount. “Chairman, remember?”

“Right, right.” Korra shakes her head. “How _could_ I forget?”

His lips twitch, and he straightens a little against the stack of pillows. “It’s good you’re thinking ahead like this. It means you’ll be better prepared. Overall, though, I wouldn’t worry. An Avatar like you, you’ll do fine.”

Korra gives a little scoff, but smiles at him to counter the sting. In spite of herself, she is glad for his suave politician’s encouragement. Still, she can’t resist a slight jibe. “Not half-baked anymore?”

Tarrlok snorts quietly, his pale eye softening as he looks at her.

“Never half-baked.”

\- - -

The light is just beginning to turn rose-gold as Korra mounts the hospital steps two weeks later.

“Avatar Korra!” the matron bustles over. “It’s good to see you. Tarrlok will be glad to see you too, but it might be best if you wait a few minutes – “

“Why?” Korra asks, tensing and feeling a sudden cold in her stomach. “What’s wrong, has he…”

“Oh, no, no, nothing like that. It’s just, you’ll see…ah, here he is to tell you himself!”

Korra wheels. At the top of the staircase, Tarrlok makes a little wave. His smile is crooked and more than a little ironic, but genuine.

“Nice timing, Avatar.”

Korra barely even hears the healer recede with a soft farewell, so intent is she on Tarrlok’s slow descent. At times he leans heavily on the banister, but he doesn’t come to a stop until he’s standing in front of her.

“You can close your mouth now,” he suggests straight-faced.

“Huh,” Korra says, tipping her head back to look at him. She’d forgotten how tall he is, and how much she always used to dislike having to look up at him. Oddly, it doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

Tarrlok’s fingertips touch first his throat, then the still-bandaged right side of his face briefly. “Would you mind showing me around? I haven’t seen much of the hospital.”

“Sure,” Korra agrees, a little surprised. “Do you want to go outside, or…”

“Outside will be fine.” They fall into step together, Korra’s boots scuffing across the tile floor and echoed by the whisper of his soft cloth shoes. “Lead the way.”

Korra’s footsteps don’t quite slow in surprise when she realizes he’s positioned himself with his blind side facing her. After a cautious glance at him to see how he’s faring, she leads him to a pine grove nearby. It’s a peaceful place, quiet and hushed beneath the trees, where she sometimes sits to compose herself before going in. Too late she remembers it’s within earshot of the sea. Tarrlok doesn’t seem to notice, though, as he brushes pine needles off the branch and seats himself with a soft sigh.

“It’s strange how much clearer the air seems out here,” he says, looking around.

“Yeah,” Korra says, running her feet through the thickly scattered pine needles. “This spot has a good view of the sunset.”

“So it does.” He tips his head back. “And we can see the statue of Katara, too.”

It’s one of the reasons Korra likes this grove. From this angle, the statue’s face is too high to be seen clearly and in any case would be far different from the one Korra knows. Still, she can’t help but be comforted by the frozen swirling robes and the hands raised in a waterbending kata. On days when Korra feels she cannot confront the smell of illness and an eye that either avoids or meets her own too directly, she finds her courage here.

She steals a glance at him now. In this shadowy half-light, he looks almost well, his back straight but not stiff, his hand turned palm up on his knee. It’s plain he’s lost weight, but there is nothing of false peace or hopeless despair about him now. Rather, the sense is one of quiet, deep and clear and revealing nothing.She wonders, not for the first time, if she will ever really know what he is thinking.

He glances back at her and raises an inquiring eyebrow. Embarrassed to be caught staring, she shrugs. “Do you know when they’re going to take the bandages off?”

The quirk of his mouth says he recognizes her maneuver. “They’ve started taking the bandages off my face and…eye…for a little bit each day.” He pauses. “They let me have a mirror yesterday.”

Korra resists the impulse to tense, keeps her voice cool and even. “How was it?”

“Not pretty.”

His tone gives nothing away. She glances sideways at him.

“You know, I find that hard to believe. You’ve always been a very pretty person.”

He wrinkles his nose at her, but doesn’t comment.

“Seriously.  You have a nice smile,” she continues. “Well. When you actually mean it, anyway.”

This makes him laugh. She grins too; it’s been too long since she heard him laugh out loud. Tarrlok’s voice has regained its customary lightness as he continues.

“If all goes well, the bandages can go off for good in two weeks. After that I could go home in about a month.”

 “You’ll go back north, then?” Korra isn’t sure why the thought makes a sudden dart of sadness flash through her mind. She isn’t sure, nor does she stop to inquire.

But he’s shaking his head. “No, I’m staying in Republic City. There’s nothing for me in the North.”

“Oh.”

Korra shuffles her feet in the dirt, knotting and unknotting her fingers in her lap. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him glance at her, and his mouth slants up in a smile. “What are you thinking of, my Avatar?”

She flushes. “Nothing.”

“Mm.”

She looks down at her hands, then back at him. The words spill out in a rush.

“Tarrlok, I…”

She comes to a halt. In the shadow of the pines it’s too dark to see his face clearly, but she can hear the dry amusement in his voice.

“Spit it out.”

Korra inhales deeply through her nose. She’s wanted to tell him this for a while, but she’s never managed to find the words or the place. Certainly the hospital room was not suited to it, but…is this any better? Katara’s unseeing marble gaze directed high above their heads, the sigh of the sea as present as a heartbeat? Should she even tell him at all?

“Korra?”

She clutches the edge of the bench until her knuckles turn white.

“I buried your brother.”

Tarrlok goes very still. Korra links her hands on her knee and keeps talking, her eyes fixed on Katara’s statue.

“The council wanted to bury him at sea, but I talked them into giving him a plot in Adlivun Temple out in the mountains. I found a caribou hide to wrap him in, and lit some incense, and I built a cairn for him…”

She trails off and looks down at her clasped hands. The wind, loud in this suddenly silent space, brings the smell of crushed pine needles to her nostrils. There had been pines at the burial ground too. Her footsteps on the fallen needles had been near noiseless, and the wind in the trees had been indistinguishable from the waves.

“It would have been fitting,” is the only reply Tarrlok makes.

Korra starts to respond, then realizes she doesn’t know whether he’s referring to a burial at sea or the Avatar burying Yakone’s firstborn son. In either case, anyway, she wouldn’t know what to say. She tightens her hands and nods once.

After a pause, he says, “Thank you.”

She doesn’t respond to that either. It had most definitely not been nothing to bury a man devoted to her undoing, a man whose mask still stalks her dreams. Yet, when it came time for the funeral preparations, the council had talked of returning his body to the sea where his brother tried to take their lives, and she could not have let that happen either.

So Korra remains silent, and Tarrlok does too. He didn’t seem to have been expecting an answer anyway.

They watch the sun go down together. For a moment, it catches behind the statue of Katara, rimming her frame with gold, making her outstretched hands run scarlet.

\- - -

One day in early winter Korra gets directions to Magnolia Crescent from a woman in the street and walks the rest of the way. She smells the harbor before she sees it, the scent of salt in the air sharpening as she heads down the street. Then she rounds a corner, and the vast sweep of the bay confronts her. Today it is as gray as mother-of-pearl, with small waves ruffling the surface. Even here on the sidewalk with an iron railing in between them, she can sense the tides tugging deep in her blood. After a moment she turns away and keeps walking.

This is an expensive neighborhood. Sleek cars occasionally prowl past her, with both chauffeurs and passengers staring at the Water Tribe girl in rough-cut clothing and worn boots. Korra ignores the looks and counts the turnings until she reaches the fourth one. She turns left there.

The call of the sea is even stronger here. Each of the houses has a back facing Yue Bay, and Korra passes a discreet stairway leading down to a small beach. So close to the sea, in this quiet district, the sound of the waves must be very clear at night.

At the seventh house she stops to study the exterior. It is smaller than she had expected, without grandiose ornamentation or stiffly maintained plantings, but still too big for one person. All the shutters are pulled shut, giving it a wary, closed-off look.

There is, of course, a carving of Tui and La on the door. Korra can’t help but roll her eyes as she knocks.

While she waits she rocks back and forth on the balls of her feet, looking around her at the veranda and neat gray house. There are ferns growing in porcelain pots by the steps and a small waterfall tucked in the corner, with tiny orchids blooming in the protection of its crannies and crevices. By the door is a bush of late-blooming white lilac. Korra brushes her fingers against the small blossoms, then raises her fingers to her face. The faint, sweet smell grounds her again, suddenly makes the house seem less chilly.

She hears soft footsteps in the house and quickly straightens. When Tarrlok opens the door, Korra is standing with her hands linked behind her back and her eyes ready to meet his. She hasn’t seen him for a few weeks, and the sight of his uncovered face briefly takes her breath away. Korra masters herself quickly, though, and her gaze never once wavers.

She had prepared herself for everything: sarcasm, elaborate courtesy, even a door closed in her face. What she hadn’t been expecting was nothing. That’s what she gets, though: a speechless Tarrlok who stares at her in silence and hasn’t moved a single muscle since he opened the door. Now that she’s here, Korra can’t find the words either. It’s a greeting, after all, only a greeting, nothing of concern after all that’s passed between them. There is a difference, though, between Tarrlok in a hospital bed and Tarrlok here: straight-backed, clad in blue, one eyebrow lifted in automatic irony. The only difference between him and the councilman she remembers is that for once, he has nothing to say.

The silence stretches on until Korra, embarrassed, drops her gaze to her shoes. He’s wearing white socks, she notices absently, the fine linen pale against the dark wood floor. There’s a tiny thread fraying on one of them. Somehow it makes him look less arrogantly polished, more human. Certainly, he no longer seems an enemy. Whatever he is now, she is not sure, but an enemy he is not, has not been for a long time. She knows that, just as she knows how he has a bone-dry sense of humor, can be bitter and kind in the same breath, and grieves, in his own silent way, for his brother. Beyond that she can only guess. Perhaps that is enough.

Korra shuffles her feet and takes a deep breath.

“So. Hey.”

**Author's Note:**

> In case you're wondering, this is a prequel to my earlier story “(Dear) and so unsure”. Tonally, however, the two are so dissonant I thought it best to let them stand alone.
> 
> Also, the song I took the title from, Vienna Teng’s “Drought,” was basically my soundtrack for writing this story. It’s also simply a beautiful song, so give it a listen when you’re able.


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